Yeah, what she said.

Let me tell you about my morning.  I have two psychotic cats (yes, I know all cats are psychotic by definition, but these are more so than most).  However, even knowing their psychotic nature, I had never previously had any undue concern about any murderous tendencies; or, more accurately, I felt fairly secure in my assumption that, even if they wanted to kill us, they wouldn’t be able to get sufficiently coordinated to do so, lacking opposable thumbs.  Now, I’m not so sure….

I have a drive-under garage, which serves as overnight parking for both my car and my felines.  One of them, some time ago, developed the habit of beating up the neighbor cats, so she’s confined indoors.  So, to prevent her from escaping when I open the garage door on my way to work, I usually let her upstairs into the house first.

Picture the scene.  I walk to the basement door, open it, and ask as usual if she’d like to come upstairs.  I hear silence for a moment, then the jingle of the bell on her collar.  Instead of next hearing the delicate tread of her soft paws on the stairs (read: herd of elephants), however, I hear a crash, then scrabbling and rustling of plastic for awhile.  Then silence again.  I start down the stairs.  It’s at this point that I realize my cats are trying to kill me:  there is a tripwire stretched across the stairs at just ankle height.  And a kite, which was previously stowed on the other side of the basement, is now over against the garage door, its string spool still lodged at its starting point.

I’m moving the pruning shears.

How we look at ourselves is rarely an accurate picture, and how we try to present ourselves to others is an even more skewed representation. Ever since it became fashionable to represent oneself online with a graphical icon/avatar, I’ve been fascinated by them. Some people choose to use actual photos of themselves to link their online presence to “real life,” while others choose fictional characters, items or logos with special significance, photos of people they’d like to look like or otherwise emulate, or simply nothing at all.

Recently I saw a link to an avatar generator site I hadn’t seen before, which inspired this post. I wasn’t terribly impressed with that particular site, but there are a variety of web-based avatar wizards out there that come up with quite a wide range of effects. Following are some I’ve checked out (although I’m omitting the truly awful ones I’ve seen).

	WeeWorld creates cute, cartoonish avatars. There’s enough variety for each part to keep it interesting, and there is a great deal of animation. The site requires (free) registration to get past the basics. The downside of this site for me was that the Flash application was a definite CPU hog, slowing down other processing I was trying to do at the same time. There was a delay in loading some of the images as well. Still, a fun little site with lots of options.
Digibody’s Caricature Maker yields a rather different effect from most other avatar generators I’ve seen. Louai Munajim is a caricature artist who has broken his art up into various pieces so that it can be assembled into a wide variety of custom avatars. The result is a very nice black and white sketch effect. I’d like to see a bit more variety here, but the graphics present are beautifully done. You could easily end up with either a fairly realistic looking sketch, or something with over-exaggerated features to the point of being completely silly. One of the nicest things about this generator is that it allows you to position each element of the avatar independent of the rest, so you can easily slide the nose a couple pixels to the right, nudge the hair into place just a little higher on the forehead, etc.
	WhuddleWorld Avatar Maker is off the scale when it comes to cuteness, but otherwise quite limited — the graphics are few and most of them are obviously female, so creating a male character would be a stretch. Despite the restrictive options, however, the characters turn out with great personality and charm.  Makes you want to pinch their virtual little cheeks!
The generically-named Avatar Maker on i-am-bored.com is a staple among avatar generators. It boasts a very bright, modern look, enough graphics to be interesting, and an extremely easy-to-use interface. There’s nothing that special about it except for the stylized appearance of its characters, but it has fewer drawbacks than most of the rest, and it’s just a solid little app.
	Portrait Illustration Maker was one of the first web-based avatar generators I ever ran across, quite a number of years ago. It’s still one of the most flexible and comprehensive, even if not the most intuitive to use. And it is also actively maintained, with new graphics being added regularly. This site was the primary inspiration behind a desktop-based avatar generator I once wrote myself (but never quite got around to finishing the graphics library or really polishing it). Like Digibody, the editor here allows different elements of the avatar to be adjusted separately. It also has the added feature of making the avatar available (temporarily) as an image link, for ease of sharing with friends. Portrait Avatar Maker is provided from the same source, with similar art and editing.
Dream Avatar Creator is an anime-style avatar generator based on GaiaOnline. There are a lot of options for clothing and accessories; somewhat less so for basic features. I found the interface rather non-intuitive and painfully slow and unresponsive. I don’t know if the website was just experiencing a high volume of traffic when I visited it, or if that behavior is the norm for that site. My sample avatar ended up rather sloppily and haphazardly dressed since I couldn’t be bothered to wait for all the graphics to load, and then wait some more for them to be applied, as I tried them out. I like the art, though. And it has the very definite advantage of being the only avatar generator site I’ve found so far that provides baby seal slippers as an apparel option.
	Avatar Wizard is the site that sparked this set of reviews. However, I don’t have a lot to say about it: mediocre selection, mediocre graphics, mediocre interface. No particular complaints, but nothing to recommend it either.
For South Park fans, there’s South Park Studio, where you can create a South Park style version of yourself. Not the best interface, but the graphic selection isn’t bad (given the character style). And in a similar vein, there’s the Mini-Mizer which lets you create a custom Lego figure.
	And finally, there are the ubiquitous Yahoo! Avatars, which provide a huge variety of options, complete with animation, zooming, etc. To my mind, the only real complaints here are having to register for the site, not being able to independently position different elements of the avatar, and having no convenient way to save the avatars for use with anything except Yahoo! Messenger (which I suppose is the point).

None of these are the be-all and end-all of avatar generators, but all address different features of the process. I imagine it would be pretty difficult to develop something with all the flexibility of, say, Portrait Illustration Maker, with the ease of use that Avatar Maker demonstrates. Perhaps someday (in my copious free time :P), I’ll give such a project another try.

Music is really a strange thing.  It is to poetry what sculpture is to drawing.  It gives it form and shape and texture that simply cannot be captured in two dimensions.  It’s been pointed out to me recently that I have unusual tastes in music, and I suppose that’s true enough.  I definitely enjoy an eclectic range of styles, and while there are some styles that I gravitate to more than others, I daresay there is no musical genre in which I can’t find something of beauty.

What a person listens to says a lot about that person; it speaks of taste and personality and history.  My own history undoubtedly has something to do with my  musical tastes.  I am fortunate to have two parents with beautiful voices, and impromptu a capella ”oldies” like folk songs or Negro spirituals were common fare for any car trips.  My mother sang my brother and me to sleep each night to the sound of Peter, Paul and Mary, and I learned to roller-skate to her collection of 45’s.  My husband laments that she has warped me for life.

Most particularly, the songs that most draw me are those with lyrics that evoke a response, be it tears or smiles or laughter.  And vocal harmony has a strong attraction for me as well.  When both of those elements are combined, well, I’m going to be lost in the song for awhile.

Winter, spring
It’s what love can truly bring
Ice turns to water
Water flows to everything
You can lose your mind
Baby, then your heart you’ll find
I hope you won’t give up whats movin’ you inside

So if you’re waitin’ for love
Well it’s a promise I’ll keep
If you don’t mind believing that it changes everything
Then time will never matter

~ Jars of Clay, “Sunny Days”